Moderate Wisp

The continuing saturation of the fields means that there are still big flocks of these around:

and many hundreds of these Fieldfares too:

It only rained once in the week. It was just for 15 hours on Friday. The floods are actually up on last week:

So still lots of Snipe present. A moderate wisp here:

And another wisp landing here. One of the better collective nouns for birds:

I took the picture below on my phone from the car mid-week when temperatures were hovering around -4 and I was dying of a norovirus infection. Actually dying would have been preferable. Then I would not have had to clean up the rest of my children's vomit too. Anyway, the point is that the hedge on the left was bursting with Fieldfares, Redwings, Blackbirds, Chaffinches and Yellowhammers. And the hedge on the right was devoid of all life. There were no birds at all. Why is it necessary for farmers to cut back hedges like this in early winter? Leaving this task till early spring leaves food and shelter for wildlife in the winter period. It smacks of pointless tidying up and must contribute to the 50% loss of farmland bird numbers in the last 30 years.

Here are some very depressing numbers from Europe: